Question: Here is my hog hunting plight. My lease has a strong hog population. We have hog sign all over the place. However, I’ve yet to see one during daylight. Saturday morning after my hunt, I poured 160 pounds of corn around my bow stand. Saturday evening, nothing. When I went back Sunday morning: POOF, everything vanished. So my question is will feral hogs ever revert from nocturnal movements?
Answer: The hogs on where I hunt now move during either the day or night. This is true for most everywhere there are hogs. As luck would have it — it’s really their smarts — they mostly move when I’m not there, of course. The following day day is then like a photo shoot on the trail camera with hogs all over the place — in the daylight.
If I choose to sit there 2 day straight — nothing. But now and then a hog will pass through and I’ll get a crack at him. That’s what makes hog hunting so much fun, the waiting or tracking and stalking. As a rule of thumb, I do see the most of my hogs at night. If you shot one every time you wanted it would take some of the fun out of it.
Feral hogs do tend to be nocturnal or crepuscular, moving in early morning and late evening. This can vary between the seasons. Hunting pressure will turn hogs nocturnal faster than anything else, so my suggestion is to hunt when pressure is light, or at least lighter.
In Central Texas, we would never see hogs during the day during the deer hunting season. However, we could almost count on them moving during the day during late February, March and April. This was because all the deer (and hog) hunters had been sacked out at the home for the past few months and hogs had the run of the land.